A High Selectivity Crystal Set
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| This & other outdoor photo by Daun Yeagley at MVUS picnic Aug. 3, 2002 | |
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| (All other photos by Dave Lundy) | |
wire suspended from a helium filled baloon. Well, as soon as I saw his
crystal set, a few thoughts came to mind immediately. He uses adjustable
spacing between several "stages" to adjust the coupling between the
stages to eliminate what I had always experienced, overloading! Not
to mention huge coils wound of #8 copper wire and 8" in diameter. Ed
uses 4 stages in his set. The first stage has the antenna wire coming
in to the top of the coil, then through the tuning capacitor and then
to ground, a series circuit. Then there are 2 intermediate stages which
are just parallel tuned circuits. The detector is a random length of
small gage wire with a germanium diode going the headphones and then
back the the coil. Then we got to talking about Q and how this could
be a large factor on selectivity. Ed told me the highest Q coils he had
made were around 800. Well, let's see what I can do with all this new
visual information.Very shortly after this, I found a good source of 1/4" copper tubing and came home with 8 boxes of 50' lengths in each box. My immediate thoughts were how to make the "coils" and how to maintain good spacing.
After obtaining several large air variable capacitors and finding out that they were only 270 pf each, I had to make the coils a little larger in inductance. I found out that I needed about 120' of 1/4" tubing to resonate in the broadcast band with those capacitors. The next game to play was to determine the shape factor of the coil using one conductor diameter as the spacing. This will be 2 turns per inch and the shape factor will be 1 x 1 for this design.
There will be twice the number of turns as the diameter. For instance, if you choose a 12" diameter for your coil, it will be 19 turns long which would be a 1.6 x 1 ratio. That would not be unusable. However, a close formula would be L, 1440" , divided by the length in inches in one turn equals the number of turns divided by the spacing in inches. Also, figure an even number of turns and allow 1 foot on each end to be bent up to reach the tuning capacitor. In my case, I made a 15" diameter form 16" long.
To
make the coil form, I cut out 2 discs of 3/4" plywood 11 1/2" diameter.
Locating the center of the discs, I drilled 1 1/4" holes to accept a
piece of pipe. I cut out 36 - 15/16" wide pine strips 18" long to be
attached around the circumference of the plywood discs. Leave 3 strips
removable at the 12, 3, 6, and 9 o'clock positions. Also, leave 50%
of the strips removable so the coil can be removed from the form. All
the rest of the strips can be nailed on.
To make the spacing
as uniform as possible, I drilled a pair of strips, 1/2" x 3/4" x 18"
long together on the vertical mill using a 1/4" drill bit. I made
4 sets of spacer sticks. Wind up the tubing as best you can wearing
gloves to keep finger prints off the copper. Remove the sticks at
the 12 o'clock position to install the spacer sticks and the clamp
for gluing. The clamp was made out of two pieces 3/16" thick 2" wide
aluminum plates 20" long. The hole pattern was drilled on the mill, also.
I drilled through both pieces using
a .159 drill for a 10 x 32 thread. Drill the other plate holes out with
a .190 drill to "clear" a 10 x 32 screw. I drilled the pattern so I
could use screws between every turn of the coil, but after using this
clamp, every third turn is fine. It can squash the pine spacer sticks
very easily! I used Elmers water soluable wood glue for the project.
If some aspect of your work has to be re-done, simply soak the coil
in the bathtub over night and the whole thing will fall apart and all
the parts are re-usable! (Don't tell the wife) This coil has a Q of
1040.
After the coil has been built, I made 10" x 20" plywood pieces to hold
the coils and capacitors.
The dial plates are 1/8" white plexiglass and the pointers are 1/4" thick
10" long clear plexiglass. The knobs are 1 1/4" diameter Delrin. The 2"
x 4" x 8' frame has a notch cut out of one edge for the plywood pieces
to slide to adjust the coupling between the stages. The 8' long frame is
NOT long enough for proper spacing for strong stations for the 3 stages,
which I use.
To verify the possibility of reaching the point of
diminishing returns, I made another coil 18" diameter 18" long using 1/2"
diameter copper tubing. Still a 1 x 1 ratio and the measured Q nose dived
down to 680. In actual use, I CAN tell the difference without using an
instrument to tell me the difference! This coil was made before I made
the clamp. See all those ugly screw holes....
I live near Dayton, Ohio and this set allows me to listen to WOR 710 Kc in New York with WLW 700 Kc in Cincinnati right next to them! By the way, I use Baldwin headphones. So, high Q coils and proper interstage coupling is the answer.
Here is the
schematic.